Exhibition | Giuseppe Marchesi (il Sansone)
Giuseppe Marchesi, known as il Sansone, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro / Mosé e le figlie di Jethro, ca. 1720–25, oil on canvas
(Private Collection)
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Bologna’s Musei Civici d’Arte Antica hosts the first monographic exhibition on the early career of the painter Giuseppe Marchesi, known as Samson.
Leggiadro Barocco: L’attività giovanile di Giuseppe Marchesi detto il Sansone
Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, Palazzo d’Accursio, Bologna, 1 April — 2 September 2023
Curated by Antonella Mampieri and Angelo Mazza
Giuseppe Marchesi (1699–1771)—of restless temperament and imposing build, to which he owed his nickname ‘Samson’—was among the most fruitful painters in cosmopolitan 18th-century Bologna, where the art scene was as lively as ever. He was, however, forgotten as a result of changes in the history of taste. Leggiadro Barocco: L’attività giovanile di Giuseppe Marchesi detto il Sansone aims to rediscover this significant painter from the classicist side of the Bolognese school. A pupil of leading artists of the previous generation, including Aureliano Milani and Marcantonio Franceschini, Marchesi was part of the local painting tradition that found an indispensable model in the Carracci and their pupils—particularly Guido Reni, Francesco Albani, and Domenichino.
Giuseppe Marchesi, known as il Sansone, Autumn, from The Four Seasons, ca. 1725, oil on canvas (Bologna: Pinacoteca Nazionale).
This stylistic orientation was also supported and promoted by the city’s main artistic institution, the Accademia Clementina, to which Marchesi belonged, holding a variety of positions, didactic and directorial, until his appointment as Principe in 1752. His subsequent artistic evolution led him to the gradual abandonment of an Arcadian classicism in favor of an almost Mannerist style, similar to that of Francesco Monti and Vittorio Maria Bigari. Marchesi’s biography, present only in the manuscript lives composed by the Bolognese scholar Marcello Oretti in the second half of the century, is missing in Luigi Crespi’s Felsina Pittrice (1739) and appears only marginally in the Storia dell ’ Accademia Clementina by Giampietro Zanotti (1739), who nevertheless recognized, along with Luigi Lanzi, Marchesi’s remarkable artistic qualities for “a manner of painting so beautiful and so strong, that all delight, and good, and great fame comes to him.”
Early on there was overlap between Marchesi’s work and that of his contemporary Ercole Graziani, so much so that at the 1935 Mostra del Settecento Bolognese, which marked the resurgence of interest in this period of local art history, many of the works now ascribed to Marchesi were attributed to Graziani. It was up to critic Renato Roli to make a brilliant first reconstruction of Marchesi’s oeuvre in 1971, distinguishing the hands of the two painters. Subsequent studies, conducted mainly by Antonella Mampieri and Angelo Mazza, expanded the catalogue of known paintings, adding specimens of graphics and engravings made from Marchesi’s drawings. The ability to blend warm colors and strong musculature, derived from the Carracci, with the Arcadian grace of drawing, typical of Franceschini’s painting, made Samson a fashionable painter, up to date with the post-Baroque trends that were already in vogue in France and Austria, appreciated by the public and his colleagues.
A prolific and garrulous petit maître, his lively narrative vein yielded extremely pleasing results, especially in his younger years. The culmination of this phase was the fresco decoration of the vault and apse of the church of Santa Maria di Galliera, in Bologna, Marchesi’s first great public commission (1732–44), which established his reputation as a painter at home, in other Italian regions, and in other European countries, including England and Holland.
Giuseppe Marchesi, known as il Sansone, The Abduction of Helen, 1725 (Bologna: Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio).
The exhibition, designed for the Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, which keeps in its permanent collection the painting Clement VIII Returning the Keys of the City to the Elders of Bologna, focuses on the early period of the artist’s elegant and graceful career: his relationship with Marcantonio Franceschini, who transmitted to him his moderate Arcadian taste, to 1725, the conventional starting point of Marchesi’s independent career. Two paintings recently found on the antiques market and exhibited here for the first time from a private collection—Moses and the Daughters of Jethro and Solomon Censoring the Idols, the success of which is demonstrated by the presence of copies at the Museo Diocesano in Imola—and other examples of paintings of sacred and profane themes demonstrate the artist’s youthful style. These include the Four Seasons from the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and The Drunkenness of Noah, now in a private collection. Completing the exhibition are a miniature Portrait of a Maiden preserved at the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale and Galleria Davia Bargellini and two lively drawings from the the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna: The Abduction of the Sabine Women and The Abduction of Helen, preparatory projects for a large painting to be made in the hall of honor of the house that later belonged to the Buratti merchants, promoters of the arts and various Bolognese artists. Only the second one, dated 1725, was later realized by the painter, opening his documented career.
Leggiadro Barocco: L’attività giovanile di Giuseppe Marchesi detto il Sansone proposes a renewed reading of this protagonist of the Bolognese ’barocchetto’, allowing new hypotheses on the chronological ordering of his early work. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication edited by Antonella Mampieri and Angelo Mazza, with the collaboration of Silvia Battistini, a preface by Massimo Medica, text by Mirko Bonora, and essays by Antonella Mampieri and Angelo Mazza.
Exhibition | Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the Revolution
From the French National Archives and the Boutiques de musées:
Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the Revolution: The Royal Family at the Tuileries, 1789–1792
Archives Nationales / Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, 29 March — 6 November 2023
Curated by Isabelle Aristide-Hastir, Jean-Christian Petitfils, and Emmanuel de Waresquiel
A period of almost three years separated the end of the ancien régime from the collapse of the French monarchy. Between 1789 and 1792, the royal family, forced to leave Versailles and its splendour, lived under house arrest in Paris, in the Tuileries Palace. Through archival documents, engravings, works of art, and pieces of furniture from the Tuileries, this tumultuous period is presented in the exhibition with a particular focus on the daily life of the royal couple, Marie-Antoinette’s secret correspondence with the Swedish Count Axel de Fersen, and the intimacy of a palace that has since disappeared.
Les Archives nationales éclairent d’un jour nouveau la période méconnue qui a suivi les événements de 1789. Cette exposition rassemble une centaine de documents, tableaux, gravures et plusieurs éléments de mobilier, et propose une immersion dans le quotidien de la famille royale, depuis son départ de Versailles pour les Tuileries jusqu’à la chute de la monarchie.
Comment la famille royale a-t-elle vécu la période de grande tension politique qui a suivi le déclenchement de la Révolution ? À quoi ressemblait la vie de la cour dans l’enceinte des Tuileries ? De quelle manière le roi et la reine ressentaient-ils le tumulte de la rue et la pression de l’opinion publique ? Autant de questions qui sont au cœur de l’exposition Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette et la Révolution. La famille royale aux Tuileries, 1789–1792, présentée par les Archives nationales, à l’hôtel de Soubise, du 29 mars au 6 novembre 2023.
Riche en événements politiques, cet épisode de mille jours est bien représenté dans les archives et l’iconographie. Entre autres documents inédits ou méconnus, les visiteurs pourront ainsi découvrir le prAdolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Portrait de la reine Marie-Antoinette, vers 1785–1788. Marie-Antoinette est ici représentée dans une tenue d’intérieur. Le peintre suédois Wertmüller a aussi peint la reine en 1785 avec ses deux enfants dans le jardin de Trianon, et en 1788 en habit d’amazone. Collection particulièreé-cieux journal de Louis XVI (« Mardi 14 juillet : rien ») ouvert aux pages des années 1791–1792, son manifeste politique aux Français (20 juin 1791), un portrait de la reine très rarement exposé et la correspondance secrète entre Marie-Antoinette et le comte de Fersen. Pour la première fois, le contenu de leurs lettres codées, chiffrées et caviardées sera révélé au grand public. L’une des facettes les plus fascinantes de cette période fondatrice de l’histoire de France, marquée Lettre de Marie-Antoinette à Fersen (copie faite par Fersen), avec passages caviardés. Autographe, 26 septembre 1791par la fin d’un règne et la naissance d’un monde nouveau.
Isabelle Aristide-Hastir, Jean-Christian Petitfils, Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Lucien Bély, and Philip Mansel, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette et la Révolution: La famille royale aux Tuileries, 1789–1792 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-2072974618, €30.
The cover of the catalogue comes from a print after Jean-Louis Prieur, Siege and Capture of the Château des Tuileries on 10 August 1792 / Siège et prise du château des Tuileries le 10 août 1792, ca. 1792 (Paris: Archives nationales, AE/II/3019).
New Book | Barnave: The Revolutionary
From Yale UP:
John Hardman, Barnave: The Revolutionary Who Lost His Head for Marie Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0300270846, $40.
A major new biography of Antoine Barnave—the politician and writer who advocated for a constitutional monarchy in revolutionary France
Antoine Barnave was one of the most influential statesmen in the early French Revolution. He was a didactic man of austere morals and vaulting ambition who dressed as an English dandy, running up considerable tailor’s bills. Before his execution at age thirty-two, he played a decisive role in revolutionary politics and even governed France in 1791 through a secret correspondence with Marie-Antoinette. In the first biography for more than a century, John Hardman traces Barnave’s life from his youth in Dauphiné to his role in the Constituent Assembly and his part in forming the Feuillants, the party dedicated to the moderate cause. Despite his early death, Barnave left a remarkable volume of material, from published works to thousands of manuscript pages. Hardman uses this rich archive to explore the life of this elusive writer, politician, and thinker—and sheds new light on the revolutionary period.
John Hardman is one of the world’s leading experts on the French Revolution and the author of several distinguished books on the subject, including Marie-Antoinette and The Life of Louis XVI, which was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and won the Franco-British Society Prize.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Reluctant Lawyer
2 The Origins of the French Revolution according to Barnave
3 Political Awakening: Barnave in the Pre-Revolution, 1787–89
4 The Assemblies at Romans: The Last Estates of Dauphiné
5 From Estates-General to National Assembly
6 The Decisive Phase, 14 July – 6 October 1789
7 The Year 1790
8 Barnave’s Private Life
9 Barnave and the Court before the Flight to Varennes
10 Barnave on the Defensive
11 Varennes and Its Repercussions
12 The Revision of the Constitution
13 Governing in Secret
14 The Return of the Native: January – August 1792
15 A Long Incarceration
16 Trial and Death
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Online Conversation | Material Cultures of the Global 18th Century
Material Cultures of the Global 18th Century: Art, Mobility, and Change
HECAA Zoom Event, Wednesday, 17 May 2023, 6.30–8.00pm EST
This upcoming Zoom event, sponsored by the Historians of Eighteenth Century Art and Architecture (HECAA), celebrates the publication of a new volume dedicated to global eighteenth-century material cultures. The editors, Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, will offer remarks and invite conversation. There will also be presentations by select authors: Douglas Fordham, Yve Chavez, Matthew Gin, and Tara Zanardi.
This online event is open to all; HECAA membership is not required. Please register in advance here».
Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, eds., Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1350259034, $115. Also available as an ebook.
Exhibition | The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art, and the Sea
Willem van de Velde the Younger, A Royal Visit to the Fleet in the Thames Estuary, 1672, detail, 1672–94, oil on canvas, 165 × 330 cm (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, BHC0299). More information is available here»
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Now on view at Greenwich:
The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art, and the Sea
Queen’s House, Greenwich, 2 March 2023 — 14 January 2024
Curated by Allison Goudie and Imogen Tedbury
In the winter of 1672–73, two celebrated Dutch artists arrived in London. Willem van de Velde the Elder (1610/11–1693) was renowned for his highly accurate drawings of ships and maritime life. He would even go to sea himself, paper in hand, to capture naval battles as they were raging. His son, Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707), was a famed painter. From calm coastal scenes to fierce storms, his work captured the many moods of the ocean.
The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672, tapestry designed by Willem Van de Velde the Elder, made by Thomas Poyntz, 1672 (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum).
King Charles II offered them a studio space at the Queen’s House in Greenwich and each a salary of £100 a year to create drawings and paintings of ‘Sea Fights’. Here they worked, creating magnificent paintings and tapestries, as well as thousands of detailed sketches, drawings, and designs. The National Maritime Museum has the largest collection of works by the Van de Veldes in the world, and now, 350 years on from their first arrival in England, the Queen’s House will once again become a home for these artists, whose work would inspire generations of marine painters, including J.M.W. Turner. The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea follows the journey of these émigré artists and explores how they changed the course of British maritime art.
“The Van de Velde collection at Greenwich is remarkable not only for its sheer size but for what it reveals about how a 17th-century artist’s studio functioned,” says Dr. Allison Goudie, Curator of Art. “This exhibition celebrates this extraordinary aspect of the Van de Velde collection here, and the unique connection it now has with the Queen’s House, the location of the Van de Veldes’ studio for over 20 years.”
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Note (added 8 October 2023) — The posting was updated to include Dr. Goudie and Dr. Tedbury as the curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition | Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art
Charles Willson Peale, The Edward Lloyd Family, 1771, oil on canvas, 48 × 57 inches
(Winterthur Museum, 1964.0124 A)
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Having closed in March at the VMFA, the exhibition opens this month at the Frist Art Museum:
Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 8 October 2022 — 19 March 2023
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, 26 May — 13 August 2023
Curated by Leo Mazow
Explore the guitar as visual subject, enduring symbol, and storyteller’s companion. Strummed everywhere from parlors and front porches to protest rallies and rock arenas—the guitar also appears far and wide in American art. Its depictions enable artists and their human subjects to address topics that otherwise go untold or under-told. Experience paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and music in a multimedia presentation that unpacks the guitar’s cultural significance, illuminating matters of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and identity.
Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art is the first exhibition to explore the instrument’s symbolism in American art from the early 19th century to the present day. Featuring 125 works of art, as well as 35 musical instruments, the exhibition demonstrates that guitars figure prominently in the visual stories Americans tell themselves about themselves—their histories, identities, and aspirations. The guitar—portable, affordable, and ubiquitous—appears in American art more than any other instrument, and this exhibition explores those depictions as well as the human ambitions, intentions, and connections facilitated by the instrument—a powerful tool and elastic emblem.
The works in Storied Strings are divided into nine sections: Aestheticizing a Motif, Cold Hard Cash, Hispanicization, Parlor Games, Personification, Picturing Performance, Political Guitars, the Guitar in Black Art and Culture, and Re-Gendered Instruments. The exhibition also features smaller thematically arranged niche spaces, including The Blues, Women in Early Country Music, the Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll, Hawaii-ana, and Cowboy Guitars.
Storied Strings is curated by Leo Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has authored and coauthored a number of books, including Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, Thomas Hart Benson and the American Sound, and Picturing the Banjo.
Leo G. Mazow, Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1934351222, $40.
C O N T E N T S
Alex Nyerges, Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
Guitar Parts Diagram
1 Introducing the Guitar in American Art
2 An American Guitar Primer (Dobney)
3 Hispanicization
4 The Guitar in Black Art and Culture
5 Personification
6 Guitar-Wielding Women
7 Aestheticizing the Motif
8 Cold Hard Cash
9 Political Guitars (Nichols)
10 Wood, Strings, and Stories (Deloria)
Endnotes
Checklist of Works in the Exhibition
Selected Bibliography
Index
New Book | Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States
From Penn State UP; and save 30% with code NR23 (see below for details).
Allison Stagg, Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 266 pages, ISBN: 978-0271093321, $80.
Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists to share news and opinions with their audiences in shockingly radical ways. Complementing studies on British and European printmaking, this book is a survey and catalogue of all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years, as the nation sought to define itself in relation to European models of governance and artistry. Allison Stagg examines printed caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians in the United States’ fledgling government, reactions captured in the personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Stagg’s work fills a large gap in early American scholarship, one that has escaped thorough art-historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context. Featuring 125 images, many published here for the first time since their original appearance, and a comprehensive appendix that includes a checklist of caricature prints with dates, titles, artists, references, and other essential information, Prints of a New Kind will be welcomed by scholars and students of early American history and art history as well as visual, material, and print culture.
Allison M. Stagg is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
Orders must be placed at psupress.org to receive the discount; normal shipping charges apply. European customers may order through NBNi, using the code NR23 for a 30% discount.
New Book | The Wager
From Penguin Random House:
David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder (New York: Doubleday, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0385534260, $30.
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes—they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.
David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s investigative reporting has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.
New Book | A Treatise on Civil Architecture
From Rizzoli:
William Chambers, with a preface by Frank Salmon, A Treatise on Civil Architecture (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023), ISBN: 978-9189696358, $80.
A gorgeous, oversize, clothbound facsimile of the classic 18th-century guide to the vocabulary of Western architecture
Sir William Chambers (1723–1796) was a Swedish British architect who designed imaginative castle buildings and luxurious interiors as well as simple and rational utilitarian architecture: some of his most famous works include the Roehampton Villa, Great Pagoda, and Somerset House (all located in London). Originally published in 1756, A Treatise on Civil Architecture is an architecture handbook in which Chambers explains the basics of the art of building, aiming “to collect into one volume what is now dispersed in a great many, and to select, from mountains of promiscuous Materials, a Series of Sound Precepts and good Designs.” The guidebook is supplemented by concise texts and beautiful illustrations of classical building types and their functions. Received with considerable acclaim upon its release, A Treatise on Civil Architecture quickly became the most popular practical work on architecture in the English language and has since been republished several times. This handsome clothbound edition is published in conjunction with the 300th anniversary of Chambers’ birth.
William Chambers (1723–1796) was an architect mainly active in and around London. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and he published a number of both practical and theoretical books on architecture, gardening, and interior design.
Frank Salmon is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in History of Art, University of Cambridge and a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. Since 2021 Dr. Salmon has served as the director at the Cambridge based The Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture.
New Book | Georgian Arcadia
From Yale UP:
Roger White, Georgian Arcadia: Architecture for the Park and Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0300249958, $65.
An exploration of the origins and evolution of Georgian landscape architecture, a period of innovative and diverse garden structures in which some of the era’s greatest architects experimented with form, style, and technology
The invention and evolution of the Georgian landscape garden liberated garden buildings from the corset of formality, allowing them to structure much more extensive areas of garden and park. One of the leading authorities on Georgian landscape architecture, Roger White explores a genre in which some of the era’s greatest architects experimented with different forms, styles, and new technology. Covering not just the obvious adornments of parks and gardens such as temples, summerhouses, grottoes, towers, and ‘follies’, the book also explores structures with predominantly practical functions, including mausolea, boathouses, dovecotes, stables, kennels, deer pens, barns, and cowsheds, all of which could be dressed up to make an architectural impact. White examines these structures not only architecturally but from a functional and cultural viewpoint, considering questions of stylistic origins and development. Focussing on the contributions of Britain’s leading eighteenth-century architects—Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Gibbs, Kent, Adam, Chambers, Wyatt, and Soane—Georgian Arcadia provides a richly illustrated account of a period of innovative and diverse garden building.
Roger White is an architectural historian specialising in the Georgian period. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and has been Secretary of both the Georgian Group and the Garden History Society.
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